Dave Bonta's poem opens with a small reversal. The speaker sits watching rocks, convinced he is the only watcher, while behind him a spider mends her web, using his body as a shield against the birds. He is being used without being asked. The line that follows, "You're never as alone as you think," works as the poem's thesis, but it is tossed off almost as a shrug. Everything after it is evidence.
The form supports that casual tone. This is a prose poem, a single block with no line breaks and no rhyme, and it moves at the pace of someone telling a story on a porch. Sentences swing between long, gathering ones ("Corpses of trees glow with foxfire and flying squirrels whistle high and thin like ghosts…") and short, flat ones ("It fit so easily into my hand."). The lowercase "i" is a quiet choice too. It makes the speaker a little smaller than the landscape around him, which suits a poem about being outnumbered by other presences.
The title and the first half play with a familiar phrase. "It's not so lonesome i could cry" echoes the title of the Hank Williams song "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," and the speaker gently turns it down. Even when he does cry, it is "just to talk back to coyotes," so grief becomes conversation. The poem never explains the "fateful drink" of underground water that makes him grin. Judging by the word "Revisited," this is a return to a place and a memory, and the reader is let in on a private history only half told.
At night the "hollow turns strange," and Bonta's imagery becomes both funnier and eerier. Barred owls "hoot like chimpanzees," which is exactly the sort of comparison that makes a wild sound suddenly audible. The whippoorwill "clears his throat three times before he launches into his diatribe," giving a bird the manner of a pompous speaker. The humor keeps the poem from turning solemn, and it also makes the creatures into characters with their own business. The mood darkens once "corpses of trees" begin to glow. Foxfire is light given off by rotting wood, so death produces illumination here. The flying squirrels' whistling leads to the poem's most unsettled line: "whose ghosts, one can never be sure." The speaker slips from "i" to the more distant "one," as if even he is not quite willing to claim an opinion.
The green stone is the poem's hinge. Until now the company has been animal; here it becomes human and ancient. The stone has been "worked, given an edge that could still scrape a hide," and the word "still" collapses the time between its maker and the speaker. His hand fits where another hand once did. The plain wording of "put it back into its hole" suits an act of restraint, and "It took all my willpower" shows how strong the pull to keep it was. The final sentence, "The original owner might not be done with it yet," is wry but not entirely a joke. It treats ownership as something that outlasts death, and it quietly answers the earlier question about the ghosts.
The three-line coda is the only place where the poem breaks into lines, and the shift feels like a change of gear. It is haiku-like rather than strictly a haiku, with a short first line, a longer second and a short third. "Three-toed root" may suggest a bird's foot, though that is an inference from the image. The capital R in "Raven" makes it read like a language, as in "in English," and perhaps a presence as well. The poem's logic is completed here. Earlier the speaker talked back to coyotes, and now he is the one being spoken to, and by name. The loneliness he began with is gone, replaced by something stranger and more welcoming: the sense of being known by the place.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It treats solitude not as emptiness but as a failure to notice who else is there, and it makes that point with humor, careful observation and a willingness to leave some things unexplained.